Python and Curses, mangled mess

Hi,
I'm fairly new to Python and completely confused when it comes to Curses. Perhaps an expert here can lend me a helping hand as I'm having a heck of a time trying to get any reason out of Curses.. the documentation for it is vague and not very helpful to me anymore, I can only ever seem to get the same couple of guides a million times on Google, so if anyone has any good tutorials or examples of this python socket curses client, that'd be nice too.

I am making a 3rd party client for a game. This game is typically graphical, however this client will be text only. I need a big huge window for a chat buffer and an input box below it for inputting text. The game is pretty much just a chat program, so the buffer will be filled with lots of "He says: Hi" and "She says: Bye".

My code so far is below... I was so frustrated I got rid of the bottom input box and just made it all the same.. I guess my main questions would be:
1. How can I add "scrolling", such that text does not get overwritten in the same spot in the output window all the time. I want each new line to be at the bottom and all lines before it to move up.
2. Please please please show me how to seperate the text input window from the output text window.
3. Any other hints or help would be appreciated!

Curses were designed in the middle age of computers. The main goal is to move the cursor to line Y and position X on the screen, type a character here (possibly some special character) and set the colour of the text or of the background on that position (simplified). It was clear at that time that each character occupies box of exactly same size. You could not change the font size nor the font face. You often could not change the number of lines and the number of charactes on the line.

In my opinion, you do not want to use curses for your purpose if you use _also_ another graphical window. You should focus on creating a normal GUI window using Tkinter, wxPython, wax or some similar framework. I would recommend the wxPython + wax. Then create a window with one big TextBox for collected texts and one smaller below for entering text.

Have a look at wax primer (http://zephyrfalcon.org/labs/wax_primer.html) that in steps shows how to write a simple text editor on 70 lines of code. After understanding that, you will be able to write you chat-like window. Inside TextBox, you can use various fonts, colors, etc.

For wax, you have to download and install wxPython and the wax. But it is pretty easy.

That's nifty and something I may use another time but for this specific application I need to run from a terminal (like through PuTTy).. this is why I need curses (or something like it), to be able to seperate input from output while still using the command line interface..

Highfive is so simple that setting up every meeting room takes just minutes and every employee will be able to start or join a call from any room with ease. Never be called into a meeting just to get it started again. This is how video conferencing should work!

Frankly, I have never programmed using curses. I guess that you have looked at the curses module standard documentation and found also the URL for "Curses Programming with Python" http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/curses/curses.html. It would probably be better to ask in Unix Prog. or Linux Prog. channel, because curses are probably used mainly on unixes.

The following documets also seems to be interesting. (They deal with ncurses, but as far as I know it is a superset of the older curses which is already implemented in the Python curses module.)

There are much higher-level libraries that curses for this kind of thing. One of them is urwid - here's roughly the program you describe, implemented using urwid. It provides automatic scrolling as you describe, and also provides scrollback using the Up and Down keys. It resizes as you resize your terminal window as well. It's a simplified version of the urwid IRC example here: http://excess.org/urwid/inyyssonen_twisted_irc.py.html

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